Atlantis

CHAPTER 4

The object of their attention was revealed in every detail, the ancient sheet of writing almost luminous beneath the protective glass plate. The others drew their chairs forward, their faces looming out of the shadows at the edge of the light.

“First, the material.”

Dillen handed round a small plastic specimen box containing a fragment removed for analysis when the mummy was unwrapped.

“Unmistakably papyrus, Cyperus papyrus. You can see the criss-cross pattern where the fibres of the reed were flattened and pasted together.”

“Papyrus had largely disappeared in Egypt by the second century AD,” Hiebermeyer said. “It became extinct because of the Egyptian mania for record-keeping. They were brilliant at irrigation and agriculture but somehow failed to sustain the reed beds along the Nile.” He spoke with a flush of excitement. “And I can now reveal that the earliest known papyrus dates from 4000 BC, almost a thousand years before any previous find. It was discovered during my excavations earlier this year in the temple of Neith at Saïs in the Nile Delta.”

There was a murmur of excitement around the table. Katya leaned forward.

“So. To the manuscript. We have a medium which is ancient but could date any time up to the second century AD. Can we be more precise?”

Hiebermeyer shook his head. “Not from the material alone. We could try a radiocarbon date, but the isotope ratios would probably have been contaminated by other organic material in the mummy wrapping. And to get a big enough sample would mean destroying the papyrus.”

“Obviously unacceptable.” Dillen took over the discussion. “But we have the evidence of the script itself. If Maurice had not recognized it we would not be here today.”

“The first clues were spotted by my student Aysha Farouk.” Hiebermeyer looked round the table. “I believe the burial and the papyrus were contemporaneous. The papyrus was not some ancient scrap but a recently written document. The clarity of the letters attests to that.”

Dillen pinned the four corners of his scroll to the table, allowing the others to see that it was covered with symbols copied from the papyrus. He had grouped together identical letters, pairs of letters and words. It was a way of analysing stylistical regularity familiar to those who had studied under him.

He pointed to eight lines of continuous script at the bottom. “Maurice was correct to identify this as an early form of Greek script, dating to no later than the high classical period of the fifth century BC.” He looked up and paused. “He was right, but I can be more precise than that.”

His hand moved up to a cluster of letters at the top. “The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians early in the first millennium BC. Some of the Phoenician letters survived unaltered, others changed shape over time. The Greek alphabet didn’t reach its final form until the late sixth century BC.” He picked up the light pointer and aimed at the upper right corner of the scroll. “Now look at this.”

An identical letter had been underlined in a number of words copied from the papyrus. It looked like the letter A toppled over to the left, the crossbar extending through either side like the arms of a stick figure.

Jack spoke excitedly. “The Phoenician letter A.”

“Correct.” Dillen drew his chair close to the table. “The Phoenician shape disappears about the middle of the sixth century BC. For that reason, and because of the vocabulary and style, I suggest a date at the beginning of the century. Perhaps 600, certainly no later than 580 BC.”

There was a collective gasp.

“How confident are you?” asked Jack.

“As confident as I have ever been.”

“And I can now reveal our most important dating evidence for the mummy,” Hiebermeyer announced triumphantly. “A gold amulet of a heart, ib, underneath a sun disc, re, together forming a symbolic representation of the pharaoh Apries’ birth name Wah-Ib-Re. The amulet may have been a personal gift to the occupant of the tomb, a treasured possession taken to the afterlife. Apries was a pharaoh of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty who ruled from 595 to 568 BC.”

“It’s fantastic,” Katya exclaimed. “Apart from a few fragments we have no original Greek manuscripts from before the fifth century BC. This dates only a century after Homer, only a few generations after the Greeks began to use the new alphabet. This is the most important epigraphical find in decades.” She paused to marshal her thoughts. “My question is this. What is a papyrus with Greek script doing in Egypt in the sixth century BC, more than two hundred years before the arrival of Alexander the Great?”

Dillen looked round the table. “I won’t beat about the bush any longer. I believe we have a fragment of the lost work of Solon the Lawmaker, his account of his visit to the high priest at Saïs. We have found the source of Plato’s story of Atlantis.”

Half an hour later they stood in a group on the balcony overlooking the Great Harbour. Dillen was smoking his pipe and fondly watching Jack talk to Katya apart from the others. It was not the first time he had seen this, but perhaps Jack had found someone serious at last. Years before, Dillen had seen the potential in an unruly student who lacked the credentials of a conventional education; it was he who had pushed Jack towards a spell in military intelligence on condition that he return to make archaeology his career. Another former student, Efram Jacobovich, had provided an endowment from his software fortune that funded all of IMU’s research, and Dillen quietly delighted in the chance this gave him to be involved in Jack’s adventures.

Jack excused himself to make a satellite call to Seaquest, putting his hand briefly on Katya’s arm and striding off towards the doorway. His excitement at the papyrus discovery competed with his need to keep up with the wreck excavation. It had been only two days since Costas had uncovered the golden disc, yet already the site was producing riches that threatened to overshadow even that find.

During a lull in the conversation while he was away the others had been diverted by a TV monitor set up in a niche in the wall. It was a CNN report of yet another terrorist attack in the former Soviet Union, this one a devastating car bomb in the capital of the Republic of Georgia. Like most other recent outrages it was not the work of fanatics but a calculated act of personal vengeance, another grim episode in a world where extremist ideology was being replaced by greed and vendetta as the main cause of global instability. It was a situation of special concern to those standing on the balcony, with stolen antiquities being used to lubricate deals and black market operators increasingly audacious in their attempts to acquire the most prized treasures.

On his return, Jack resumed the conversation he had been having with Katya. She had revealed little about her background but had confided her craving to become more involved in the battle against antiquities crime than her present position allowed. Jack discovered she had been offered prestigious university posts in the west but had chosen to remain in Russia at the forefront of the problem, despite the corrupt bureaucracy and ever present threat of blackmail and reprisal.

Hiebermeyer and Dillen joined them and the discussion reverted to the papyrus.

“I’ve always been perplexed by the fact that Solon left no account of his visit to Egypt,” Katya said. “He was such a prominent man of letters, the most learned Athenian of his day.”

“Could such a record have been made within the temple precinct itself?” Jack looked enquiringly at Hiebermeyer, who was cleaning his glasses and visibly perspiring.

“Possibly, though such occasions must have been few and far between.” Hiebermeyer replaced his glasses and wiped his forehead. “To the Egyptians the art of writing was the divine gift of Thoth, scribe to the gods. By making it sacred, the priests could keep knowledge under their control. And any writing by a foreigner in a temple would have been considered sacrilegious.”

“So he would not have been popular,” Jack commented.

Hiebermeyer shook his head. “He would have been met with suspicion by those who disapproved of the high priest’s decision to reveal their knowledge. The temple attendants would have resented his presence as a foreigner who appeared to defy the gods.” Hiebermeyer struggled out of his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. “And the Greeks weren’t exactly flavour of the month. The Pharaohs had recently allowed them to establish a trading post at Naucratis on the Delta. They were wily traders, experienced from their dealings with the Phoenicians, whereas Egypt had been closed off for years from the outside world. The Egyptians who entrusted their goods to Greek merchants were ignorant of the harsh realities of commerce. Those who didn’t profit immediately felt they had been tricked and betrayed. There was a lot of resentment.”

“So what you’re suggesting,” Jack interrupted, “is that Solon did make this record but it was somehow taken from him and trashed?”

Hiebermeyer nodded. “It’s possible. You can picture the kind of scholar he was. Single-minded to the point of obsession, making little allowance for those around him. And naïve about the real world. He must have been carrying a weighty purse of gold, and the temple staff would have known it. He would have been easy prey during those night-time treks across the desert from the temple precinct to the town where he would have been staying.”

“So what we’re saying is that Solon is ambushed and robbed in the desert. His scroll is ripped up and thrown away. Soon afterwards a few scraps are collected together and reused as mummy wrapping. The attack takes place after Solon’s final visit to the temple, so his entire record is lost.”

“And what about this,” Hiebermeyer rejoined. “He’s so badly knocked about that he can only remember bits of the story, perhaps nothing at all of that final visit. He’s already an old man and his memory is dimmed. Back in Greece he never again puts pen to paper, and is too ashamed to admit how much he may have lost through his own stupidity. He only ever tells a garbled version of what he can remember to a few close friends.”

Dillen listened with visible satisfaction as his two former students carried the argument forward. A gathering like this was more than the sum of its parts; the meeting of minds sparked off new ideas and lines of reasoning.

“I had come to much the same conclusion myself from reading the texts,” he said, “from comparing Plato’s story with the papyrus. You will see what I mean shortly. Let us reconvene.”

They filed back into the conference chamber, the cool dampness of the ancient walls refreshing after the searing heat outside. The others looked on expectantly as Dillen composed himself in front of the papyrus fragment.

“I believe this is the transcript of a dictation. The text has been hastily written and the composition is not especially polished. It is only a shred of the original scroll which could have been thousands of lines long. What has survived is the equivalent of two short paragraphs divided by a gap about six lines wide. In the centre is this symbol followed by the word Atlantis.”

“I’ve seen that somewhere before.” Jack was leaning over the table and peering at the strange symbol in the centre of the papyrus.

“Yes, you have.” Dillen looked up briefly from his notes. “But I’ll leave that for a little later, if I may. There is no doubt in my mind that this was written by Solon in the temple scriptorium at Saïs as he sat in front of the high priest.”

“His name was Amenhotep.” Hiebermeyer was flushed with excitement again. “During our excavation last month at the Temple of Neith we found a fragmentary priest list for the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. According to the chronology, Amenhotep was over a hundred years old at the time Solon would have visited. There’s even a statue of him. It’s in the British Museum.”

Hiebermeyer reached over and tapped the multimedia projector, revealing a figure in classic Egyptian pose holding a model naos shrine. The face seemed at once youthful and ageless, concealing more than it revealed, with the mournful expression of an old man who has passed on all he has to give before death enfolds him.

“Could it be,” Katya interjected, “that the break in the text represents a break in the dictation, that the writing above represents the end of one account, perhaps one day’s audience with the priest, and the writing below the beginning of another?”

“Exactly.” Dillen beamed. “The word Atlantis is a heading, the start of a new chapter.” His fingers tapped the laptop he had connected to the multimedia projector. They could now follow a digitally enhanced image of the Greek text alongside his English words. He began to read the translation he and Katya had been working on since they had arrived the previous day.

“And now for the second section,” Dillen went on. He tapped a key and the image scrolled down below the gap. “Remember, this is pretty unpolished stuff. Solon was translating Egyptian into Greek as he wrote. So for us it’s relatively straightforward, with few complex phrases or obscure words. But there is a problem.”

Their eyes followed his to the screen. The text had scrolled to the end, the words petering off where the papyrus had torn away. Whereas the first paragraph had been well preserved, the second was progressively truncated as the ripped edges converged in a V shape. The final lines contained only fragments of words.

Katya now began to read.

“Atlantis.” Her accent gave the syllables added emphasis, somehow helping to bring home the reality of what they had before them.

“The first sentence is uncontentious.” She focused on the screen and spoke under her breath.

“Dia tn nson mechri hou h thalatta stenoutai.” The vowels almost sounded Chinese as she recreated the lilt of the ancient language.

“Through the islands until the sea narrows. Past the Cataract of Bos.”

Hiebermeyer frowned in puzzlement. “My Greek is good enough to know that katarrakts means a down-rushing or waterfall,” he said. “It was used to describe the rapids of the upper Nile. How could it refer to the sea?”

Dillen walked to the screen. “At this juncture we begin to lose whole words from the text.”

Katya again read. “And then twenty dromoi along the southern shore.”

“A dromos was about sixty stades,” Dillen commented. “About fifty nautical miles.”

“It was in fact highly variable,” Jack said. “Dromos means ‘run,’ the distance a ship could sail in one day while the sun was up.”

“Presumably it varied from place to place,” Hiebermeyer mused. “According to winds and currents and the time of year, taking into account seasonal changes in climate and daylight hours.”

“Precisely. A run was an indication of how long it would take you to get from A to B in favourable conditions.”

“Under the high bucranion, the sign of the bull,” Katya went on.

“Or bull’s horns,” Dillen suggested.

“Fascinating.” Hiebermeyer spoke almost to himself. “One of the most redolent symbols in prehistory. We’ve already seen them in Jack’s pictures of Knossos. They also appear in Neolithic shrines and all over the Bronze Age palaces of the Near East. Even as late as the Roman period the bucranium is everywhere in monumental art.”

Katya nodded. “The text now becomes fragmentary, but the professor and I agree on the likely meaning. It will be easier for you to understand if you see where the breaks occur.”

She switched the projector to overhead mode, at the same time placing a transparent sheet on the glass plate. The screen showed her neatly written words below the V shape of the lower part of the papyrus.

“Then you reach the citadel. And there below lies a vast golden plain, the deep basins, the salt lakes, as far as the eye can see. And two hundred lifetimes ago Poseidon wreaked vengeance on the Atlanteans for daring to live like gods. The cataract fell, the great golden door of the citadel shut for ever, and Atlantis was swallowed beneath the waves.” She paused. “We believe these last sentences were a way of linking the story with the end of the land of Keftiu. Perhaps the high priest’s theme was the wrath of the sea god, the vengeance taken by Poseidon on men for their hubris.”

She aimed the pointer at the screen. “The next section was probably the beginning of a detailed description of Atlantis. Unfortunately there are just a few disconnected words. Here, we think, is golden house or golden-walled. And here you can clearly read the Greek letters for pyramid. The full phrase translates as immense stone pyramids.” She glanced questioningly at Hiebermeyer, who was too stunned to comment and could only gawp at the screen.

“And then these final words.” She pointed at the ragged tail of the document. “House of the gods, perhaps hall of the gods, which is again kata boukers, meaning under the sign of the bull. And there the text ends.”

Hiebermeyer was the first to speak, his voice quivering with excitement. “Surely that clinches it. The voyage through the islands, to a place where the sea narrows. That can only mean west from Egypt, past Sicily to the Strait of Gibraltar.” He slapped his hand down in affirmation. “Atlantis was in the Atlantic Ocean after all!”

“What about the cataract?” Jack asked. “The Strait of Gibraltar is hardly a raging torrent.”

“And the vast golden plain, and the salt lakes,” Katya added. “In the Atlantic all you would have is the sea on one side, high mountains or desert on the other.”

“Southern shore is also perplexing,” Jack said. “Since there is no obvious southern shore to the Atlantic, that would imply that Atlantis was in the Mediterranean, and I can hardly imagine a citadel on the barren shore of the western Sahara.”

Dillen unhooked the overhead and flicked the projector to slide mode, reloading the digital images. A range of snow-capped mountains filled the screen, with a complex of ruins nestled among verdant terraces in the foreground.

“Jack was correct to associate Plato’s Atlantis with Bronze Age Crete. The first part of the text clearly refers to the Minoans and the eruption of Thera. The problem is that Crete was not Atlantis.”

Katya nodded slowly. “Plato’s account is a conflation.”

“Exactly.” Dillen stepped back behind his chair, gesticulating as he spoke. “We have fragments of two different histories. One describes the end of Bronze Age Crete, the land of Keftiu. The other is about a much more ancient civilization, that of Atlantis.”

“The dating difference is unambiguous.” Hiebermeyer mopped his face as he spoke. “The first paragraph on the papyrus dates the destruction of Keftiu to the reign of Thutmosis. He was a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, in the sixteenth century BC, exactly the time Thera erupted. And for Atlantis ‘two hundred lifespans’ in the second paragraph is in fact a fairly precise calculation, a lifetime meaning about twenty-five years to the Egyptian chroniclers.” He made a swift mental calculation. “Five thousand years before Solon, so about 5600 BC.”

“Incredible.” Jack shook his head in disbelief. “A whole epoch before the first city states. The sixth millennium BC was still the Neolithic, a time when agriculture was a novelty in Europe.”

“I’m puzzled by one detail,” Katya said. “If these stories are so distinct, how can the bull symbol figure so prominently in both accounts?”

“Not a problem,” Jack said. “The bull was not just a Minoan symbol. From the beginning of the Neolithic it represented strength, virility, mastery over the land. Plough-oxen were vital to early farmers. Bull symbols are everywhere in the early agricultural communities of the region.”

Dillen looked pensively at the papyrus. “I believe we have discovered the basis for two and a half thousand years of misguided speculation. At the end of his account of Keftiu, the high priest, Amenhotep, signalled his intention for the next session, giving a taste of what was to come. He wanted to keep Solon in a high state of anticipation, to ensure he returned day after day until the final date allowed by the temple calendar. Perhaps he had an eye on that purse of gold, on ever more generous donations. I think we have a foretaste here of the story of Atlantis in the final sentence of the account of Keftiu.”

Jack immediately caught his mentor’s drift. “You mean that in Solon’s confusion the word Atlantis may have replaced Keftiu whenever he recalled the story of the end of the Minoans.”

“You have it.” Dillen nodded. “There’s nothing in Plato’s account to suggest Solon remembered anything of the second section of text. No cataract, no vast plain. And no pyramids, which would be difficult to forget. Someone must have hit him pretty hard on the head that final night.”

The sun was now setting, its rays casting a rosy hue on the waters of the Great Harbour below. They had returned to the conference room for a final session following a late afternoon break. None of them showed any sign of exhaustion despite the hours they had spent huddled round the table with the precious document. They were all bound up in the elation of discovery, of uncovering a key to the past which might change the entire picture of the rise of civilization.

Dillen settled back and spoke. “And finally, Jack, to that symbol you said you had seen before.”

At that moment there was a loud knocking on the door and a young man looked in.

“Excuse me, Professor, but this is very urgent. Dr. Howard.”

Jack strode over and took the cellphone that was offered to him, positioning himself on the seafront balustrade out of earshot of the others.

“Howard here.”

“Jack, this is Costas. We are on Red Alert. You must return to Seaquest at once.”